Best avoided unless free and you are a tinkerer with lots of time.
Written: Sep 02 '06
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Cheap or free. Overclockability potential. Runs any socket 7 cpu.
Cons: Not very stable. Compatability issues. ISA problems. Slower than some other MVP3 boards.
The Bottom Line: Not for newbies. Best for tinkerers and those with lots of old cards and time to waste.
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| wadenjulie's Full Review: Leadman FIC VA-503+ Motherboard |
The board was free to me and came with a K6-II 400 cpu. I threw it aside as a spare to be used later. I purchased a 500 MHz cpu with the plan of building a set to use in my front room for Internet, e-mail, music and video/dvd playback and music editing. Setup has been trying at best and downright irritating most of the time. I've spent over a weeks worth of evenings trying different combinations of hardware and OSes and finally have a combination that works but still isn't as stable as my similar Epox MVP3-C setup. This board appears to dislike the ISA buss as no combination of ISA cards would work together. It is presently working with a single ISA CT2940 Sound Blaster card, an Intel Pro100 PCI network card and an ATI Rage PRO 8MB AGP video card. Operating systems did not make much difference in the stability or compatability of the system. XP is too bloated and slow to run really well on this system, 98 seemed to have some compatability issues, once again largely with the ISA buss. I ended up with WinME and it seems to be faster and more stable than anything else. RAM-128 MB PC100. HDD-13GB 5400rpm.
If you like a challenge you might think this board is fun. It can be made to work but I would avoid ISA cards on this board, which defeats some of the purpose of setting up an older board - being able to use the old hardware you already have laying around. If you like to build a system that you know will work well and be stable from the start without a lot of fussing this is not it.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
wadenjulie
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Reviews written: 3
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